Novels made of short stories

[David Lurie]

In the last few years we have seen many authors go this way - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout even won the Pulitzer - and I am asking myself who were the first writers to attempt to paint the big canvas of a novel with a number of connected short stories but I can't find a satisfying answer by myself, any idea?

[Kyriakos]

Not exactly what you are looking for, but it is old enough (19th century) : Baudelaire's short story collection entitled "The spleen of Paris" :)

[Alexander III]

Boccaccio's The Decameron, dated about 1353, is the oldest one I know of. Though I never liked it much, from those times, especially in Italy there was much better work

[Pensive]

Will Flowers for Algernon count? Though I don't remember very well if it was the short story that came out first or the novel itself....

[David Lurie]

Boccaccio's The Decameron, dated about 1353, is the oldest one I know of. Though I never liked it much, from those times, especially in Italy there was much better work

I suspect I didn't made myself clear in the opening post: Il Decamerone doesn't qualify here as a novel made of short stories because I'm talking about connected short stories and when I say connected I don't intend a loose structure like Boccaccio's but same characters and/or themes constantly returning in the stories, the Baudelaire's book mentioned by Kyriakos could fit the bill much better than Boccaccio's.

[kasie]

James Joyce: Dubliners (1914).

The connecting strand is the city - Dublin is as much a character as the people about whom the stories are told. The other connecting strands are aspects of life, Age/Youth, Birth/Death, etc.

btw - it doesn't look like a novel and isn't sold or reviewed as such but by the time you've read all the stories, you realise that you have actually read one story made up of interconnected parts.

[OrphanPip]

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio is what comes to mind for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winesburg,_Ohio_%28novel%29

[Jassy Melson]

Faulkner's The Unvanguished is a novel made up of three connected long short stories. Also Proust's Remembrance of Things Past would qualify, I think.

[nandakishore]

The U.S.A Trilogy by John Dos Passos, maybe?

[David Lurie]

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio is what comes to mind for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winesburg,_Ohio_%28novel%29

Yes! I think we are on the right track with this suggestion.

[Kyriakos]

On a more contemporary note, there is "The mirror in the mirror" by Michael Ede.
I liked most of the two first stories, but nothing else from it. But you might want to give it a try :)

[Scheherazade]

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth StroutI want to read this one.
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio is what comes to mind for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winesburg,_Ohio_%28novel%29This is the one I wanted to mention as well; it is one of my favorite books.

[Alexander III]

I suspect I didn't made myself clear in the opening post: Il Decamerone doesn't qualify here as a novel made of short stories because I'm talking about connected short stories and when I say connected I don't intend a loose structure like Boccaccio's but same characters and/or themes constantly returning in the stories, the Baudelaire's book mentioned by Kyriakos could fit the bill much better than Boccaccio's.

Ahh my bad I mis-read your post, then a good recommendation for what you have in mind is Naked Lunch.

[hazelk]

Black Bird House - Alice Hoffman...She always adds a touch of magic in her writings.

My favourite is Olive Kitteridge.

[stlukesguild]

I suspect I didn't made myself clear in the opening post: Il Decamerone doesn't qualify here as a novel made of short stories because I'm talking about connected short stories and when I say connected I don't intend a loose structure like Boccaccio's but same characters and/or themes constantly returning in the stories, the Baudelaire's book mentioned by Kyriakos could fit the bill much better than Boccaccio's.

Paris Spleen is not a collection of short stories at all but rather a collection of prose poems... a form that became popular with French poets of the era. Personally, I don't see how the Decameron does not qualify as a novel simply because the tales told do not employ returning characters (it most certainly employs returning themes). Like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Arabian Nights, and many other early collections of tales, the Decameron employs an over-arching "frame story" in which the characters of the story-teller do return again and again.

A more recent variation on the theme would be Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics in which the "novel" is a collection of individual stories that could stand on their own... but there is a repetition of themes and the constant return of characters... especially the narrator, Qfwfq.

[Alexander III]

I suspect I didn't made myself clear in the opening post: Il Decamerone doesn't qualify here as a novel made of short stories because I'm talking about connected short stories and when I say connected I don't intend a loose structure like Boccaccio's but same characters and/or themes constantly returning in the stories, the Baudelaire's book mentioned by Kyriakos could fit the bill much better than Boccaccio's.

Paris Spleen is not a collection of short stories at all but rather a collection of prose poems... a form that became popular with French poets of the era. Personally, I don't see how the Decameron does not qualify as a novel simply because the tales told do not employ returning characters (it most certainly employs returning themes). Like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Arabian Nights, and many other early collections of tales, the Decameron employs an over-arching "frame story" in which the characters of the story-teller do return again and again.

A more recent variation on the theme would be Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics in which the "novel" is a collection of individual stories that could stand on their own... but there is a repetition of themes and the constant return of characters... especially the narrator, Qfwfq.



I think what the OP meant however was not a novel composed of short stories, but rather a novel composed of non linear, limitedly correlated segments.

[TheFifthElement]

Well, not the earliest for sure but David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten both probably fit the bill. Plus Mitchell transfers characters into his other books, so there are connections between Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream and Black Swan Green if you're eagle eyed and determined to look for them.

[JCamilo]

Well, Dom Quixote, Gulliver, Candide...wait Satyricon... mostly because novels or romances are pretty much developed as short stories united by theme, frame or wandering character...

[David Lurie]

Black Bird House - Alice Hoffman...She always adds a touch of magic in her writings.

Interesting, but this is a recent book and what I don't understand is when this trend started
Black Bird House - Alice Hoffman
Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout
If you eat you never die - Tony Romano
A visit from the goon squad - Jennifer Egan
The sisters from hardscrabble bay - Beverly Jensen
all of them published in the last 5-6 years - and I guess there are others around - they are American writers and I am unaware of a similar trend in countries like Italy and France that I know well.
A lot of useful replies, thank you all!

[JCamilo]

with Homer?

[David Lurie]

with Homer?

are you talking baseball Simpson or what?

[JCamilo]

No, the trend of having a work composed of small episodes loosely or not tied between them (either by narrators, by characters, by scenario, by theme) is something old as Homer, check the Odyssey, each chapter is a single story (the books are put together later and it was very likely they werent always perfomed as whole by the narrators), then you can see the Metamorphosis which is a sequence of tales put together by theme (sometimes characters will move from one tale to another but not always) and this can be seen on chivaliry romance (being written on verse does not turn make them be less romances thna modern ones), or stuff like 1001 Nights (Scherazed and Sharyar have their own serie of stories and the inner tales interfere with them, not to mention several characters will reapear). It is not something new...

[David Lurie]

JCamilo have you read the OP?
no one said this is a novelty, what caught my attention is that a bunch of writers in the last few years have used this format and I was wondering why, why now and who was the first writer who used it or started the trend, that's all, probably it got to do with publishers and editors, especially after Strout won the Pulitzer.
It's obvious that when you tell a story - whatever way/style/format you will decide to employ - some basic ingredients will be always there, but this doesn't lessen the importance of the way/style/format of choice. Today Cloud Atlas has been mentioned many times, try reading it without breaking the stories - breaking the architecture of the book indeed - and tell me if it is the same thing.

[JCamilo]

Yes, it is the samething. Even because the older books, etc were collections of stories that were broken out and while recited they would rarelly be put together... It is not because James Joyce did with Finnegans Wake a story which can be read from any point, or Julio Cortazar Hopscotch which pages have 2 different numbers, so you can alter the order, or Calvino Castle of Crossed destines or If a Traveler or Bradbury MartiaN Chronicles that it is a modern idea.
For example, Robert Louis Stevenson has a novel (New Arabian Nights, other titles still used for same body of works) which was first a serie of short stories around the same two characters...

[dfloyd]

Of modern novelists, there are Somerset Maugham's Ashenden series of WW1 spying and Michener's Tales of the South Pacific which I believe won a Pulitzer price. Also, Bret Harte's Tales of the Gold Rush. Many of Damon Runyon's stories of New York 'characters' are interelated with recurring characters such as Nathan Detroit. If I remember correctly, the movie 'Guys and Dolls' was taken from a series of short stories.

[Wilde woman]

How are you defining a "novel"? It seems like we've found a number of works, from as early as Classical and medieval times, that are episodic yet united thematically. By your implicit definition of a novel, you seem to want more than a bunch of unrelated episodes connected by an overarching frame story, since Chaucer and Boccaccio don't fit your category.

[Kyriakos]

Another novel, published a few years before 1900 you may want to have a look at is Arthur Machen's "The three impostors".
It is a collection of self-sufficient short stories, but the person to whom the stories are narrated remains the same.
Also it includes my favourite short story of the horror genre, "The white powder" (the recluse of Bayswater) :)

[David Lurie]

How are you defining a "novel"? It seems like we've found a number of works, from as early as Classical and medieval times, that are episodic yet united thematically. By your implicit definition of a novel, you seem to want more than a bunch of unrelated episodes connected by an overarching frame story, since Chaucer and Boccaccio don't fit your category.

I think everybody here knows a novel when (s)he sees one, don't you think? :D
Chaucer and Boccaccio didn't write novels, I have never heard - or read - that Decameron and Canterbury tales were novels - novel isn't a casual word but the word we use to define a long narrative in prose (a single word more than this and chaos would arise :boxing_smiley:) furthermore the word novel - the way we understand it - is quite recent in the English language: late 18th century, the word wasn't there because there were no novels around. Needless to say a narrative is a narrative and no matter if you write verse or prose there will be basic elements and techniques that the writer will employ always, nonetheless as far as I know the novel is a narrative form whose development started in the modern era, ergo after the Middle Ages - by the way, if we really want to go into Greek literature I'd like to remember that in the hellenistic period there were novels in ancient Greece too, only a handful have survived but we know that the reputation of this works was similar to pop fiction of today or even worse since at the time only poetry had literary value.
What I'm trying to say is that I don't see the novel in a peculiar way, as a fact a few forumers here have understood what I meant when I wrote "novels made of short stories" and have helped me to find fitting examples and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson is the "ancestor" I was looking for, but then it comes a new question - for those who have read at least one of the books I listed yesterday - is this narrative form a success or is it only a cheap way to make a novel? I have read Strout, Romano and Egan and I hope to read soon Anderson but for now I think this narrative form cannot achieve the complexity and fullness of the novel, I find it sketchy.

[JCamilo]

I think everybody here knows a novel when (s)he sees one, don't you think? :D

Not really. Some languages do not even have words that will show difference between Romance or Short Tales like English does. And this is more complicated, since the word Novela is not from english origem and it was used way before the 18th century in Spanish (as Cervantes did used it) and even in english there is a considerable difficulty to determine what is a Novella, what is a short story, etc (specially while dealing with very length short stories or very short novels) and Certainly, Decameron is a novel, by any definition.



Needless to say a narrative is a narrative and no matter if you write verse or prose there will be basic elements and techniques that the writer will employ always, nonetheless as far as I know the novel is a narrative form whose development started in the modern era, ergo after the Middle Ages - by the way, if we really want to go into Greek literature I'd like to remember that in the hellenistic period there were novels in ancient Greece too, only a handful have survived but we know that the reputation of this works was similar to pop fiction of today or even worse since at the time only poetry had literary value.

My point is that if you skip the form (verse or prose) you see the idea is behind it already. Nothing new. Iddyls of the kings of Tennyson is a serie of poems over a single theme, apparently not idependent, but Tennyson made them be a whole. A bit easier, since old narratives were fragmented and put together almost in an artificial way by collectors of poems, etc. Sometimes they changed one or another detail to give their collection an unity. So, the idea of a bigger work made of independent part is very old, it may not have the format of, lets say, Trainspotting (or if you notice, Tarantino Pulp Fiction) but nothing stops a prose writer had his ideas from poems.



What I'm trying to say is that I don't see the novel in a peculiar way, as a fact a few forumers here have understood what I meant when I wrote "novels made of short stories" and have helped me to find fitting examples and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson is the "ancestor" I was looking for, but then it comes a new question - for those who have read at least one of the books I listed yesterday - is this narrative form a success or is it only a cheap way to make a novel? I have read Strout, Romano and Egan and I hope to read soon Anderson but for now I think this narrative form cannot achieve the complexity and fullness of the novel, I find it sketchy.

The question would imply that a form of a text is what demands something to be a success or be commercial. Considering that a novel made of several short stories is not new, but old, it is an artistic success or rather usual style (you may have other format, one that you follow a single event or character destiny for chapters, who appear to be tied, but Dostoievisky had the chapter "Great Inquistor" read and published apart of Brothers Karamazov), we should see this as the talent of the writer.
As I mentioned, it is old, Faulkner Sound and Fury is made of 3 different stories, which together tell the stories of an entire family, but all of them worked with a different perspective and also time frame. Now and then, this notion returns, it may only seem "moderm" because short stories werent seem as very important while compared to poetry and romances, so the author had to disguise it within narratives, but it is already there.

[David Lurie]

Certainly, Decameron is a novel, by any definition.

Not in this world or not in Italy at least, il Decamerone is a collection of 100 short stories - "novelle" in Italian, that is where the English word comes from - and even a high school student here in Italy would tell you that the first "romanzo" - novel - of the Italian literature is Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi - The Betrothed. Boccaccio and his contemporaries in France put the foundation - writing prose in "lingua volgare" - for the narrative form that would dominate the modern era, but they didn't write novels nor romans.
Interesting post anyway, I mean you are from Brazil and I am from Italy so it's interesting to see how alien sounds to you an opinion which would sound rather obvious here in Italy.

[JCamilo]

Yes, that because a Novelle as italians use or Spanish may imply a short story, but also imply the serial short stories in the Decameron, 1001 Nights or Canterbury Tales style (they would not be a collection of Short stories, which we can say is "Extraordinary tales of Poe, but rather another narrative device, but that would be irrelevant, as in Italian you people would call Novella either sittuation and not Romance, which would be the chivaliry stuff, more close to Arthur and Charlesmagne stuff, which was written during medieval ages, the thing is in english they mix both -If someone says Dickens wrote Romances or Novels it would not sound strange).
You italians invented the Novels as you people tried to create devices for narratives other than the tale within tales of Decameron or bring to prose the narrative poems and Cervantes did all this at once (If you see, many of the small adventures of Quixotes were also traidtional "novellas" that Cervantes knew about and used, instead of just writing a collection of Novellas like the Extraordinary Novels)...
So, the first Romanzo novel as you mean about Mangoni is really what we would call Romance XVIII-XIX century style and yeah, when we have to bring those things in english, it can be rather confusing (In portuguese there is only 3 deffinitions, Conto - Novela and Romance, while Novela is usually a serial work in several chapters, rather confuse to be split in any form)...

[hazelk]

Postcards by Annie Proulx.

[kelby_lake]

Canterbury Tales?

[LMK]

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde